David Bowie: Out of This World (2021) Movie Script

I'm very much a character

when I go on stage

and believe in my part

all the way down the line,

right the way down.

But I do play it for all it's worth

because that's the way

I do with my station.

That part of what Bowie

is supposedly all about.

I'm an actor.

David Bowie,

one of the greatest pioneer

artists and rock stars

of the 20th century,

a visionary, an innovator, a provocateur,

extravagant and controversial.

He transcended music, fashion, and art.

A genuine songwriter,

whose songs reached unprecedented

heights around the world.

A man who kept expanding, exploring,

and evolving throughout his life.

Inspiring and teaching

generations of musicians

about blending different styles of music,

changeable and unpredictable.

He remains immortal in the hearts of many.

Music is like a journey through your life

and his music punctuated my

life in terms of question marks

and exclamation marks and everything.

That's wonderful about music.

I kinda followed it through.

So yesterday is a tragic day

for a lot of music lovers

and he's about light and music and love

and everything that's

wonderful in the world

when there's so much dark in the world

that some like barriers they're creative

and they can just lift anybody.

So that's why I find it so sad really

that someone so special is gone.

Listen to the chords he used,

they are so unbelievably difficult.

The song structures are just incredible.

He didn't write three minute pop songs,

he wrote pieces of art

that we could listen to.

David Bowie was a rock and roll revolution,

driven, fierce, and always

wanting to escape conformity,

an outsider, an adventurer,

a man out of this world.

David Bowie was born David Robert Jones

on January 8th, 1947 in

Brixton, South London.

He came from a working class family.

He had strong bonds with

Terry, his half-brother,

but he grew up in an

unconventional household.

A dark cloud roamed over his family.

A number of his mother's

relatives were touched

by mental illness and

suffered from schizophrenia.

Some also committed suicide.

Terry's mental health deteriorated later on

and Bowie was scared that he would also

eventually be affected by this illness.

In fact, some even said that

the different personalities

that David created

throughout his life was a way

of coping with his latent

schizophrenia tendencies.

He grew up a complicated man.

When he was just 15 years old,

a traumatic event happened to him.

Bowie got in a fight over a

girl and got punched in the eye.

This led him to four months

of hospital treatment,

after which doctors came to the conclusion

that young David wasn't going

to see completely clearly again.

He was left with a

permanently dilated pupil.

The incident gave Bowie those

unique extra terrestrial eyes

and his most iconic feature.

At 17 David was already

different and determined.

He wore his hair long, really

long considering the times.

After so many insults thrown

his way about his hairstyle,

he decided he just wasn't

going to take it anymore.

He formed a society called the

Society for the Prevention of

Cruelty to Long-Haired Men.

This move was his first

step on the path to fame

that he would achieve within five years.

Well, I think, we're all fairly tolerant,

but over the last two years

we've had comments like darling

and can I carry a handbag, thrown at us.

I think you just have to stop now.

No, I like it, and I think

we all like long hair

and we don't see why

other people persecuted us because of this.

England has a marvelous habit of being able

to dissipate everything

through this marvelous media

and long hair quickly got dissipated.

I mean, I used to be able

to stop traffic quite easily

by just walking down the street,

no move, not just that,

'cause I had long hair.

A year later at the age of 18,

David Jones adopted the name David Bowie

and from then on, he

dreamed of reaching fame.

Bowie was fascinated by

space travel and inspired

by the British rocker, Vince Taylor,

the legendary Stardust cowboy,

who after taking too many drugs

and an emotional breakdown decided

he was an alien god on earth.

He created an androgynous

and flamboyant persona

called Ziggy Stardust.

The name Ziggy came from a tailor shop

he had seen from a train window.

Bowie took Ziggy Stardust

as a stage persona.

Ziggy was for him an alien rockstar sent

to earth as a messenger.

His intention was to create a character

who looks like he's landed on Mars.

With flame red hair and

striking colorful costumes,

he quickly developed his own style

and looked extraordinary out of this world.

His appearance actually reflected

his feelings of being an outsider.

He said that he often felt a drift

and alienated from the normal world,

but that seemed to appeal to audiences.

It made him relatable because

he had something for everyone

and appeal to people who

thought they were outsiders too.

They were grateful to him for that.

He made them feel like it

was okay to be different.

Whenever I photographed him live,

he always had the 20

different costumes and so on.

He was very different and he

gave people the opportunity to,

he made people understand that

it was okay to be different.

And a lot of kids when they're growing up,

certainly in the substances in late 60s,

they weren't sure not only

of their own sexuality,

but of lots of things,

lots of kids are loners,

and not just said, "Well, I'm different.

You can be different

and just get out there

and be your self."

And I think he encouraged

a lot of people to do that.

And the fact that people

say he was chameleon-like,

but in a way I think, he

was an inventor as well,

an originator, and he never

made the same album twice.

I think when we were

watching Ziggy Stardust,

we felt we were part of a cult really,

our parents were horrified

that we would go and see a

man who dressed like that.

Bowie was always quite an

underground artist anyway.

I mean, he was mainstream

because the tabloids

in the UK were kind of

appalled by the way he looked

and so it was easy for them to put a splash

on the front cover and criticize him.

These are all papers now

who did 20 page pullouts

about how great he was.

But at the time they

weren't supportive at all.

It became obvious to me

that every young person

at some point in their

life thinks of themselves

as the other, the outsider, the freak.

And they had found in at least

one of Bowie's many personae,

the other, the outsider, the freak.

They related to that, it gave them hope.

Bowie had something for

everyone, including black people.

Very important in the

United States where he did

that soul album, "Young

Americans" and the Live Soul Tour,

and also in a famous confrontation

on MTV in 1983, in which

he criticized them for not

playing enough black music.

The widest range of people

for the widest variety

of reasons related to and

felt grateful to this man.

And I think that that is

the lasting legacy of Bowie

more so than any particular

song or any particular album.

Just five days

before the first moon landing

in 1969, Bowie released "Space Oddity".

It became his first top five entry

on the UK single chart after its release.

♪ This is Ground

Control to Major Tom ♪

♪ You've really made the grade

♪ And the papers want to

know whose shirts you wear ♪

♪ Now it's time to leave

the capsule if you dare ♪

In 1972, he released the

single "Life on Mars",

which reached number three in the UK.

♪ Is there life on Mars

There was magic

and mystery in his music and lyrics.

Following this success,

his Ziggy Stardust tour

catapulted him to stardom

as he toured over the UK and

the USA for a year and a half.

This started a cult of Bowie

and a long lasting fandom.

I'm really trooping, you know.

This is my life really,

writing or performing.

I don't know, there's not much else I want.

It was at that point with Ziggy

that his previous releases

started flooding into the charts.

And in late 72 and 73

Britain had Bowie IDAs,

where everything he'd done was

in the chart at the same time.

And it was a very giddy period for people

who had not known his work because it was

suddenly like this is the most

productive man of the year.

And in early 73, "Space Oddity" was

finally a hit single in the United States.

Of course, "Space Oddity" was

helped in Britain by the fact

that the BBC played it in

coverage of moon operations.

Just when Starman was a success,

just when the Ziggy Stardust

album was a huge success,

I saw him playing the Glasgow, huge venue,

and it was so popular to do two shows.

And I was working that night,

I was playing that night.

So I went along to see this afternoon show

and it was just astounding.

I heard four people on stage

making this amazing noise.

And the presence that the

man had it was uncanny.

It had them tight audience

that palm of his hands.

And I seem to remember in my memory of it

'cause it gets colored over the years,

my memory was completely

exciting, vibrant show.

In reality, it was four guys

on stage brilliant music

and a few flashing colored lights,

but it was something I'd

never experienced before.

It changed my opinion on music forever.

♪ There's a starman

waiting in the sky ♪

♪ He'd like to

come and meet us ♪

♪ But he thinks he'd

blow our minds ♪

♪ There's a starman

waiting in the sky ♪

Bowie became famous not only for his music,

but also for his appearance,

something that the whole

world talked about.

He looked strange, but he

was made to be in history.

Bowie married Angie Barnett

in 1970, his first wife.

She was the one who actually encouraged him

to feel confident in

dressing more feminine.

They had a son they named Zowie Bowie,

now known as Duncan Jones,

who was born in 1971.

But it was more of a

marriage of convenience,

a show business marriage.

Their love was doomed from the beginning.

He ended up getting tired

of her wanting to direct his career.

Their golden years turned to ashes

and they divorced in 1980.

Bowie declared himself gay in an interview

in 1972 coinciding with his

campaign for stardom as Ziggy,

which was deemed very courageous.

On other occasions, he declared

himself bisexual in 1976

and in 1993, a closet hetero.

He did say that these were more a product

of the times than his own feelings.

He knew that this would allow

him to get more attention

from the media and draw

more audiences to his music.

His goal was super stardom,

to reach worldwide success,

and to be moving the culture.

He refused to be put in a category

so that he could have room to work in

and could remain creative.

No label could describe him.

Some declare that he

was more transgressional

than he was ever really gay,

heterosexual, or bisexual.

He probably liked

experimenting out of curiosity,

the same way he experimented

everything else in his life.

Bowie was never politically

engaged or an activist,

but by being a queer icon,

he did a lot for the sexual

revolution of the 1970s.

His influence was even above the activists.

You often heard the word

visionary used about Bowie

and he was, throughout the

1970s into the early 80s,

ahead of everybody's curve.

It's very interesting to

read a couple of comments

by people from today's LGBT

community, trying to figure out

how Bowie relates to today's community

by the standards of today's community.

Because everybody notices, well, he didn't

actually do any political activism

and that's because he was

above political activism

and what he was doing had a greater effect

than political activism

because he didn't affect laws,

he affected human beings

and he probably did as much

for gay liberation as any individual law

during the time period

because he liberated the

people in themselves.

He was weird.

I mean, I have to say

working class kids growing up

in Glasgow, quite a hard city at the time,

to see this androgyny on

national television was shocking

and unbelievably exciting

'cause the music was great.

The look of the guy was fantastic.

Him and Mike Ronson, he's

a guitarist sidekick,

were just outstandingly

powerful, but brilliant music.

So it kind of took that

whole, I don't know,

we'll just call it glam rock,

I'm not sure you'd call it glam rock,

that took that whole idea of

top of the pops been a bit fun

and bubbly in water and challenged

that held a mirror up to us all saying,

"Okay, you know what you

think your life is okay,

this is what we can do, this is acceptable.

This is okay to have this

bizarre presence on your screen."

Yeah, and you saw it, you saw people react

in very strange and wonderful ways,

but it was like a door opening

in the use of that period.

It was a door opening that

exposed them to something

that they had never ever thought about.

This fantastic, weird, almost

alien light character coming

into your sitting room, it

was just incredibly exciting.

In 1972, he released the lead single

to his album "Aladdin

Sane" that would remain one

of his signature tunes, "The Jean Genie".

It became Bowie's biggest hit to date.

♪ Jean Genie lives on his back

♪ The Jean Genie

loves chimney stacks ♪

♪ He's outrageous

♪ He screams and he bawls

♪ Jean Genie, let yourself go

In July, 1973 Bowie and his

backing glam rock group,

The Spiders from Mars, performed

at the Hammersmith Odeon in London.

The sold out concert was triumphant,

but Bowie made the sudden

surprise announcement

that the show would be the

last show he would ever do.

Later understood to mean

that he was retiring his

Ziggy Stardust persona.

It was the most exciting thing

I'd ever seen on stage to that day.

Seeing Bowie marry that

theatricality in a way

with rock music was something

nobody had had ever done.

People were talking about

it for weeks beforehand

and really, really looking forward to it.

And then on the night, so

many kids were dressed up.

So many people wanted look like Bowie

and we'd all love to have Panart

and various degrees of success.

Your memory of it at the

time, you didn't have that

to compare it to, you have

nothing to compare it to.

And it was until and the most

exciting thing I've ever seen.

I would still say it was one

of the greatest shows I've ever seen.

♪ Ziggy played guitar

♪ Jamming good with

Weird and Gilly ♪

♪ And the Spiders from Mars

♪ He played it left hand

It was some kind of

discovery in the 80s I think

that a lot of what I am is my enthusiasms,

that I've always been a very curious

and enthusiastic person,

again, it says from when I was a teenager.

And that it really wasn't up to me

to try and identify

exactly what that meant.

I just had to accept that I was a person

who had a very short attention span,

who would move from one thing

to another quite rapidly.

Throughout his career,

he appeared in over 30 movies,

television shows, and theater productions.

His love for acting manifested

in the way he immersed himself

completely in the characters.

He often stated that he

preferred dressing up as Ziggy

rather than being David.

His musical and film roles

added another dimension

to his career, whatever

persona he was playing,

the work was always

creative and imaginative.

His theatricality and

creativity fascinated people.

His shows like "Ziggy Stardust"

and "Aladdin Sane" were filled

with shocking stage moments,

where he looked almost as

if he was being possessed.

As soon as he walked on the stage,

he unleashed this crazy character,

but off stage, he was intensely private.

That's great.

There must be moments where

the persona takes over,

the character kind of dominate

because all we ever get to

see, but then you see the guy

behind it and it says

the character Manatee.

So it's a vehicle for

him to express himself,

but every time I ever met him,

he was this funny, lovely,

warm, just great character.

I'm very much a character

when I go on stage.

I feel it.

Yeah, I believe in my part

all the way down the line,

right the way down.

But I do play it for all it's worth

because that's the way

I do with my station.

That's part of what Beau

is supposedly all about.

I'm an actor.

I think he was saying

tensely private off stage.

And he can dress up and

be this outrageous figure

of video and film on stage,

but off stage in a way,

he was never much of a public figure.

With his fame,

came difficulties and challenges.

Some of his singles and

albums didn't have the success

that he was expecting and

he was often disappointed

and angered by the crowd's response.

At 27, 1974, he was also broke

and in serious financial trouble

due to lack of business management.

I need the money.

I desperately need the money.

I've been a silly boy about

my financial arrangement.

And it's only over the last couple of years

that I've been able to get back anything

from almost 10 years working publicly.

So I really, I really have to do this.

I mean, it sits my job when it sort of it's

like carting your paintings

around the exhibitions

and the gallery is trying

to sell it for you,

and for me, it's the equivalent thing.

He also started

to struggle separating Ziggy Stardust

from his own character off stage

and his personality became affected.

Bowie was always striving

for innovation, novelty,

and experimentation.

And it turned out that

playing the same character

over and over was exhausting.

His enthusiasm started to fade.

In 1975, at 28, he relocated to Los Angeles

leaving his Ziggy alter ego behind.

Bowie released his 10th

album "Station to Station"

in 1976 with a new character.

After Ziggy Stardust came

the elegant thin white Duke.

Again, the persona was based

on a humanoid alien played

by Bowie in the film, "The

Man Who Fell to Earth",

the album may the top five

in both the UK and US charts.

And this put him back on

solid financial ground.

♪ The return of the

Thin White Duke ♪

♪ Throwing darts

in lovers' eyes ♪

♪ Here are we, one magical

moment, such is the stuff ♪

♪ From where dreams are woven

Again, he was so different

and the influence of soul on this music

and the kind of music

he'd been listening to

in the US made a

completely different album.

But I loved that persona as

well The Thin White Duke period.

I don't know if it again

it's because I saw him then

and I was so young and it

kind of formed an impression,

but it was so mysterious.

But it was very exotic for me

as a young child, it was very exciting.

However, the 70s were one

of the worst periods of his life.

He became addicted to cocaine,

which caused severe

weight loss and paranoia

and it affected his sanity deeply.

He overdosed several times

during the year of 1976.

He even claimed that he was pro-fascism

and compared Hitler to rock

stars, such as Mick Jagger,

which he later on apologized for

and blamed on his

psychosis from cocaine use.

It was a time of huge emotional

and inspirational struggle for him.

He claimed that his drug addiction

and delusional behavior

were due to Los Angeles,

which he came to resent as he

felt the city alienated him

and that he was living

like one of his characters.

He was falling apart,

but he realized it and

decided to make a change.

And as I really didn't

want to be by myself,

I was living more and

more in the style of one

of my characters who

wanted terrific success

because they're all Messiah

figures most of them,

either light or dark shadowings.

And so because I knew, I really felt

that the material aspect was

something that had to be done

in Los Angeles because

it's driven into you.

It's the food of Los

Angeles, Hollywood rather,

not Los Angeles, unfair on Los Angeles.

And so I just packed up everything one day

and I moved back to Europe again.

He and his family

left California for Europe

in late 1976 to improve his

physical and mental wellbeing.

He moved to Switzerland for a time

where his cocaine use decreased

There, he indulged in his

childhood passion of painting,

which was a way for him to make sure he was

always doing something

productive and creative.

He was also an art collector.

That's the first thing I did

when I got back to Europe,

was to sort of stop thinking

about music and performing

for a bit and think about

something that I hadn't done

for a long time, which was paint.

And that helped me get back

into music again actually.

Whatever the job in hand is,

is the style that I tend to adopt.

I'm pretty anti-consistency in

style much as I am in music.

Would you give up music for art?

No, but neither would

I give up art for music.

I am really fortunate

in having both the time

and the inclination and

possibly the talent to work in both media.

And I'm not a buyer of things.

I think the only thing that I buy

addictively and obsessively

probably is art.

I'm not really a house man or a car man.

The only nice car I've ever bought

for myself was a 1967 HR, one and half,

which is I would get the half.

And I don't know things,

I don't have a plane.

I haven't got very much, Jone.

I'm not a buyer of stuff.

I do tend to regard money

as the order to get other things going.

I feel more comfortable with the money.

But he wasn't completely over his drug use.

He settled in West Berlin in early 1977,

joining his friend Iggy Pop

to clean up and revive his career.

He felt we vitalized, even

though he struggled sometimes

to stay clean and sober.

While he was sharing

an apartment with Iggy,

he started to gain more interest

in the German music scene

and began focusing on

minimalistic ambient music.

In October, 1977, he released

his 12th studio album "Heroes".

It became the best received work

of his Berlin Trilogy

and a commercial success.

♪ For ever and ever

♪ We can be Heroes,

just for one day ♪

♪ We can be Heroes

But Bowie not only knocked

it out of the park with heroes,

he made heroes seem like

an anthem for the day,

we can be heroes just for one day.

The fact that people still want to heroes,

even though it was novel at the time,

shows it's a quality piece

regardless of the fact

that it was innovative.

And similarly the whole

album still sounds great.

He's described his time here

as the happiest period of his life.

The city seemed to correspond

with his personality

from his interest in history

from the Weimar Republic

to the Berlin he discovered

here in the 1970s,

his passion for discovery and innovation,

his interest in art,

which whilst in Berlin,

let him to take up painting again.

It was here that he seemed

to escape his demons to throw

off creative burnout and

rejuvenate his inspiration.

By 1978, he'd broken his drug addiction

and was slowly recovering to

a healthy enough mental state.

Isolar II world tour was the first tour

where he didn't have to take

copious quantities of cocaine

before taking the stage.

By the time he had reached 30,

his marriage with Angie had deteriorated.

They reached a breaking point in 1980

and Bowie gained sole custody of their son.

This was a bold move and he was determined

to be a good role model for him.

In 1980, he moved to New

York and made his debuts

in Broadway with "Elephant Man",

where he played a man with a

grotesque disfiguring disease.

He identified with the role

as he always had an attraction

to alienated people,

feeling like one himself.

His work was critically acclaimed.

But Bartholomew does not care about Juliet,

I care.

Does he take her pants,

does he get the doctor?

Does you make sure?

No, he kills himself.

The illusion follows him because

he does not care about her.

He only cares about himself.

I always look for characters who have

either an emotional or a physical limp.

I find that for me not being,

I don't really see my future

in acting to a greater extent

than my involvement now.

So I really liked to have characters

that I can at least play around with.

In 1981, Bowie moved to the

new romantic and pop era.

He paired with Queen

for one off single

release "Under Pressure",

the duet was a hit.

♪ Pressure, pushing down on me

♪ Pressing down on

you, no man ask for ♪

♪ Under pressure, that

burns a building down ♪

♪ Splits a family in two

♪ Puts people on streets

He reached his prime at

36 with "Let's Dance"

and other hits such as "Modern

Love" and "China Girl".

"Let's Dance" reached number

one in the UK, the US,

and various other countries in 1983.

It sold more than 10

million copies worldwide,

making it Bowie's best-selling

album of all time.

♪ Let's dance put on your red

shoes and dance the blues ♪

♪ Let's dance to the song

they're playing on the radio ♪

If you were starting out now,

I think did I read somewhere

that you said if you were

19, you wouldn't go into.

I think that's probably quite right.

I think I'd probably just be a fan

and a collector of records.

What would you do?

I wanted to be a musician

because it seemed rebellious,

it seems subversive.

It felt like one could

affect change to a form.

It was very hard to hear

music when I was young.

When I was really young, you had to tune

into AFM radio to hear

the American records.

There was no MTV,

it wasn't sort of

wall-to-wall blanket music.

And so therefore, it had a kind of a call

to arms kind of feeling to it.

Is that this is the thing

that will change things.

This is a dead dodgy occupation to have.

It still produce signs

of horror from people

who you said you're, I'm in

rock and roll is my goodness.

Now, it's a career opportunity.

His fan base exploded

as he entered popular culture

by becoming less underground

and controversial.

He reached a wider audience

and appeared more

accessible and mainstream,

topping charts along with Tina

Turner and Michael Jackson.

I think his breakthrough

kind of crossover album is

obviously "Let's Dance"

and that's when I felt

he'd got a bit too commercial for me.

'Cause you kind of like your artists

to be unknown and be underground

and you to be part of the

secret society almost.

David Bowie is great.

And ugly.

I'd like to embrace the idea

that there's a new

demystification process going on

between the artist and the audience.

I think when you look back

at say this last decade,

there hasn't really been

one single entity, artist,

or group that have personified

or become the brand name for the 90s.

And like it was starting to

fade a little in the 80s.

And in the 70s there were

still definite artists.

In the 60s, there were the

Beatles and the Hendrix.

In the 50s, there was Presley.

Now it says subgroups and genres.

It's hip-hop, it's girl power.

It's a communal kind of thing.

It's about the community,

it's becoming more and

more about the audience

because the point of having somebody

who led the forces has disappeared

because of the capillary

of rock is too well known.

It's a currency that is

not devoid meaning anymore,

but he's certainly only a

conveyor of information.

It's not a conveyor of rebellion

and the internet has

taken on that as I say it.

And so I find that a terribly exciting era.

So from my standpoint, being an artist,

I'd like to see what

the new construction is

between artists and audience.

There is a breakdown, there's

a personified, I think,

by the rave culture in the last few years,

where the audience is at least as important

as whoever is playing at the rave.

It's almost like the artist

is to accompany the audience

and what the audience is doing.

And that feeling is very

much permeating music.

However, he eventually came to realize

that being mainstream was

not what he was really after.

He was more used to being stubborn,

obscure, and confrontational.

It's quite a relief, really.

I feel a lot more free in what I do.

I just needed a positive

decision to only do what I want

to do and not do things

for the sake of what

either David Bowie or whoever

I was playing last time thing

like juke or something,

what he was expected to do.

Bowie always loved pushing limits,

challenging himself.

He in fact, believed that a good artist has

to go out of their depth to

become meaningful, and that

it requires some kind of

social dysfunctional nature.

Incredibly interested artist.

He was interested in various kinds of music

and of course the various arts.

And he picked up elements from

the avant-garde and all sorts

of areas and incorporated

them into his own work.

I got to a stage two

years ago where I found

that the experimenting that

I was doing was eradicating

a lot of the subject matter of my writing,

but now I feel for the next few years,

I'll be concentrating a lot

more basic kind of material.

In January, 1985, during Bowie's prime,

he received a devastating news

that would break his heart.

His brother Terry had committed suicide.

It was a difficult and

tragic period for him.

He would later on write a song

about the death of his

brother called "Jump",

but he had to put his struggle aside.

In 1988, he formed a new act,

Tin Machine, a hard rock supergroup.

He wants more reinvented rock and roll.

However, it was hard to

top his previous hits.

Tin Machine didn't have as much success.

As he had expected as he

was once again experimenting

by doing different things

to challenge himself,

he fell on it from many people.

♪ You belong in rock 'n roll

♪ Well so do I

♪ I love how she moves me

♪ It makes me

The 1990s seem to be the

legend's forgotten decade,

where his work was overlooked,

but he didn't dwell on the negatives

and he was determined to move

on to the next adventure.

He had a lot from the 90s.

He had his bad period for a few years,

but I think in my opinion,

he came back, he came through that.

And I think in his own admission,

he would say he was often taking the money

and his creativity suffered massively.

In my tour of television

studios the day Bowie died,

not a single person asked

me about Bowie in the 1990s.

It's as if his work

in that decade had

existed only for his fans.

And even though one of his

albums did reach number one

in Britain during that decade.

But the curious thing is

that Bowie in the 90s was

still an extraordinarily

influential person.

In 1992, he married his second wife

in Switzerland, the Somali

American fashion model, Iman,

with whom he had one

daughter named Alexandria.

In 1996, his musical success

was finally recognized

and he was inducted into the

rock and roll hall of fame.

This was a groundbreaking accomplishment.

Mr. David Bowie.

While me and my buddies are hanging out

on the Hollywood Entertainment Museum,

I would've just whip out a

mirror on the opposite side,

that's my star up there

with my name written

backwards, divaD eiwoB.

Thank you very much.

If I make any more bad albums,

you can come all over here

and walk all over me, all right?

He finally had reached a stable,

successful life, which

gave him more time to focus

on both his passions, music and painting.

I'm doing a music for self gain.

I'm doing a lot of stuff on the internet.

I'm doing a lot of painting

and a little bit of sculpting.

I'm enjoying married life tremendously.

It was my 7th wedding

anniversary the other day on the 6th,

6th of June.

The hub of my creativity comes

from what I do, where I go,

and I put myself in places that

maybe I've never been before

or that I feel there's a

certain tension involved.

I can't really write or produce much

if I'm in a place that's relaxing.

I have to have a set of

conflicts going around me,

not necessarily of my own doing,

I've learned that that

is particularly bad idea.

What do you mean?

Well, I don't create my

own conflicts in my own life.

I think I might've done

that to quite an extent

when I was young as actually

things are going too smoothly,

being an addictive personality,

I would be drawn to create conflicts

that would reduce the

attention necessary to write.

Now, I find that I can do it

by observation more than being

deeply involved in a

mess to become to write.

That means, at personal level,

you don't do drugs anymore.

No, absolutely not.

And you don't drink.

I don't drink either, no.

Not even a glass of wine or anything?

No, it would kill me if I start it again.

What do you mean it would kill you?

I'm an alcoholic, so it

would be a kiss of death

for me to start drinking again.

My relationships with

my friends, my family,

everybody around me, are so good

and have been for so many years now.

I wouldn't do anything to

destroy that again, you know?

It's very hard to have relationships

when you're doing drugs and drinking.

I felt for me personally anyway.

And you become closed off,

unreceptive, insensitive,

all the dreadful things that you've heard

every other pop singer ever saying.

And I was very lucky that

I found my way out of that.

♪ A whisper of hope

that seems to fade ♪

In 1999, the front cover

of "Hours" showed an older

Bowie with shoulder length hair.

From then on, he never released anything

as frenetic as he did in the 1990s.

A lot of what I am is my enthusiasm.

That I've always been a very curious

and enthusiastic person.

Again, this is from when I was a teenager

and that it really wasn't up to me to try

and identify exactly what that meant.

I just had to accept that I was a person

that had a very short attention span,

would move from one thing

to another quite rapidly

when I got bored with the other.

I became comfortable

with that and didn't try

and identify myself or trying

to ask myself who I was.

The less questioning I did about myself

as to who I was, the

more comfortable I felt.

So now I have absolutely

no knowledge of who I am.

I'm extremely happy.

In 2003, Bowie performed his Reality Tour,

which would become his last tour.

♪ And I'm never ever gonna get

♪ Never ever gonna get old

The show was cut short after

a blocked artery forced him

to have emergency heart surgery.

He retired from live

performing three years later

and stepped out of the public

eye to focus on his family,

but he never stopped being

part of the music scene

and continued to produce albums.

On January 10th, 2016,

the world was shaken by heartbreaking news,

David Bowie died from liver cancer.

He apparently had been quietly battling

with it for 18 months.

He had told very few people about it,

focusing rather on creating

a new album "Blackstar",

which would reveal itself

being a farewell album.

Blackstar reflected the theme of death

and mortality and

mysticism of the afterlife.

And he wanted his last

album to outlive him.

Days before his death, people

didn't guess that he was ill.

He put on a brave face until the end.

And even the press wrote

that he looked very well and healthy,

but behind the podium from

his Lazarus musical premiere,

he collapsed from exhaustion.

Having kept his illness

a secret from the world,

he died two days after his 69th birthday

and the release of his 25th

and final album "Blackstar",

which took on a whole new unexpected depth.

♪ By the time I

got to New York ♪

♪ I was living like a king

♪ There I'd used

up all my money ♪

Obviously, the Blackstar

album, everybody's now,

since he died, has seen

the meaning in the lyrics

and it's really obvious now,

but obviously without him dying,

it wouldn't have been that obvious at all.

He was just always out

there ahead extraordinary.

And then the ultimate

artistically planning for his own death.

When they were making the album Blackstar,

which actually was in

the first half of 2015,

at one point, Tony Visconti, his producer,

looked to him and said, "You're

writing a farewell album,"

and Bowie laughed.

Tony Visconti was the first

to realize, this is goodbye.

To make even your final

weekend a work of art.

This is just off the

scale of performance art.

It takes your breath away, such courage,

and the scene where he walks backwards

into the wardrobe and closes the door.

All his life, he dealt

with personal and professional struggles.

And his career wasn't always

filled with successes,

but he always overcame

what life through at him.

People were actually ringing

in a state of shock and incredibly upset.

So many people were so touched

by it and so shocked by it

because I think Bowie, because

he was quite over-worldly,

you never really thought

he had the same mortality.

And it was a shock, it

was a terrible shock.

You can never imagine

such a loss until it happens

because he was a life force.

And the reason why so

many people are touched

by this news is because he

touched their personal lives.

In the 1970s, with all

of those various images

that he went through, he was

always doing some variation

of the other, the outsider,

and every young person thinks

of themselves as the other,

the outsider, the freak,

and they latched on to one or

more of those Bowie images.

And thus his loss is very personal

to so many people watching at this moment.

Bowie channeled his family's mental illness

by expressing himself

through different personas.

He overcame drug addiction

and found peace and stability.

He never stopped reaching for the stars

and influenced generations.

Family, frustration,

and failure would shape

the icon we know today.

He's one of a kind.

This is one reason why

the grief is so widespread

and so deep is because

people know that this is it.

That was it.

Just to think that the earth

is billions of years old

and you happen to live at

the same time as David Bowie.

Well, we did see someone

unique that's for sure.

He did everything and he never stopped.

He never stopped challenging

himself for his audience

and I think that's incredibly special.

I mean, when you look

at today's artists no

one's pushing it like that.

It just doesn't touch

people in the same way.

It's magic, his music is magic.

It takes you places,

it's other worldliness,

it's so spiritualist in a sense,

but it's about romance and love

and everything that's good in the world

about being different and being accepted.

He teaches us that change is possible,

that we're not fixed as human beings,

that we can be anything that we wanna be.

And he also really spoke

to people that are unique

that don't quite fit in because he was kind

of this alien angel child that

came down to set us all free.

When he was at his peak, it

was completely all inspiring.

And you go to see the shows and

they'd be utterly different.

Not all of them successful,

but hey, it didn't matter

because come back in six months

and there'd be a new one.

And that's literally the way it was.

And this is how Bowie could

have the occasional mess

and no one held that against him

because they knew they're

trying something different

and then he'd be back in six

months or something else.

When I was a teenager, I had it in my mind

that I would be a creator of musicals.

I sincerely wanted to write musicals

for the West End or for Broadway, whatever.

I didn't see much further

than that as a writer

and I really had the idea in my head

that people would do my songs.

And I was not a natural performer.

I didn't feel the decency at all.

I had created this one

character, Ziggy Stardust,

that it seemed that I would

be the one that would play him

because nobody else was doing my songs

and the chances of him

actually getting musical

mounted were very small.

And so I became Ziggy

Stardust for that period.

And things sort of led, I liked the idea

and I felt really comfortable going

on stage as somebody else.

And it seemed a rational

decision to keep on doing that.

And so I've got quite decided with the idea

of just creating character after character.

And I think probably

there must've been a point

in the late 70s, or in otherwise,

where I felt that the characters were

in fact getting in the

way of myself as a writer

and I endeavored to kind of kill them off

and start writing for me as

just a singer songwriter.

I'm not sure if I was

ever successful in that

because I do take a degree of theatricality

when I go on stage all the time.

It's sort of that's how I

deal with the stage situation.

I'm still not comfortable on stage.

But I mean David Bowie

himself is an invention.

I mean, do you think

you've yourself as Bowie

or David Jones from South London?

Less and less Bowie, Bowie, Bowie.

The astonishing body of work

that an amazing collection

of music that is so original all the time,

and that sometimes draws on

what's around at the time

and all the times kind of sets the agenda

for all the new musicians.

I don't think there's a

single rock musician today

who hasn't been influenced by

Bowie in some way or other.

He was a giant of the music industry.

Not just someone who had been

successful over a long period,

which is a very difficult thing to do,

but someone who consistently

pushed the boundaries,

who consistently challenged

what people would expect to hear.

He earned our respect as he chose

to stay true to himself

rather than commercially safe.

The odds against another

David Bowie are astronomical

because of the commercial pressures

of the music industry forced

most artists to conform.

Occasionally, there's someone

who stays true to themselves

like Adele and the public

latch onto that and love it.

But very few, even of those kinds

of artists have the variety of interests

and talents that Bowie did.

Even now to watch him in his film roles,

whether they're great films

or not, he is charismatic,

he is a presence to contend with.

And I think of so many

people watching right now

who will in their minds have

an image of David Bowie,

but it won't be the same image

because he did so many different things.

Such a variety of styles

and images can only come

from an inquiring mind.

And that's what Bowie had an

intensely interested mind.

He was always picking up

elements of the avant-garde

and bringing them into the mainstream.

And thus in the 1970s alone,

we had this amazing

progression, science fiction

to bisexuality, to American

soul music, to electronic music,

and the images, Ziggy

Stardust, Aladdin Sane,

The Thin White Duke, the Soul Look,

the Berlin Electronic Music Look.

There was so much to digest.

In the 1970s alone, 24

hits singles, 15 albums.

This is amazing.

And that's why people have

been digesting his work

ever since, there's just so much there.

My phone started

ringing at 7:00 o'clock

in the morning that David

Bowie's death was announced.

I have not had so many requests

for broadcast commentaries

since John Lennon day 36 years ago.

That's phenomenal.

That tells you the

widespread impact of Bowie

amongst the current generation

'just that hundreds of millions of people

all had personal relationships

with David Bowie.

And this is what became so

movingly apparent so quickly.

This showed you that somehow some aspect

of his life had affected

the widest possible range

of world personalities

and of course people who were not famous.

I found this deeply moving.

Genius is an overused word,

but I think musically,

creatively, artistically

David Bowie was a genius.

For someone of my age,

he provided a lot of the

soundtrack of our life.

So we mourn the loss of a great talent.

We think about his family and friends

who've lost a loved one too early,

but I think also we an

immense British talent

who has enriched all of our lives.

I grew up listening to David Bowie.

My mom was really, really loved him

and I suppose he was my first introduction

to sort of queerness and outsider-ness

and just such a strong joyful presence.

Having him as an influence from when

I was very young influenced

everything I've done really

from how I dress to artwork to everything.

And just to being confident in who I am.

He's done more for me

than anyone could really.

I felt he just liberated so

people from mundane things.

He came from suburban,

just a lot of people could relate to that.

And the how he just made life just sexy

and vibrant throughout his career.

It's gonna be a very different

world without Bowie in it.

I hadn't really given it a

lot thought about his passing,

'cause why would I?

It's like really thought he

would live forever, really.

Few artists mark the 20th century

like David Bowie did.

He was an astonishing, passionate,

and eclectic performer that

didn't belong in a box.

Searching for change was the only constant

that didn't change throughout his life.

He was a true artist in

every sense of the word.

His art included not

only his music and sound,

but also his style and

appearance, his films, and videos.

Bowie had a unique vision and courage

and seem to turn everything into art.

The Human League Founder, Martyn Ware,

declared that he lived his life

as though he were an art installation.

His influence is deep.

His generosity, his energy,

his spirit, so full, so real.

That's the essence of being

alive because let's face it,

how many people can die

and have 28 albums sell

in large quantities.

What he did is absolutely timeless,

will be listening to in 100 years' time.

Any musicians out there,

listen to the chords he used,

they are so unbelievably difficult.

The song structures are just incredible.

He doesn't write three minute pop songs,

he wrote pieces of art

that we can listen to.

If you were there in the

60s and 70s, you were there,

if you weren't, you missed.

You can still love the music, don't worry.

But to have been there

as well as to have lived

through a very special

moment in musical history,

and David Bowie is one of

the giants of the period.

David Bowie: Out of This World (2021) - full transcript